by David Drake
But the feeling had been in the portions of his hand which had brushed the surface of the alien corpse in Maryland, and it could be that that meant something very serious indeed.
“I don’t like this,” said Commander Posner for the third time, lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just smoked through. “Associating me with you and whatever you’re doing is a public provocation to the host country, and it’ll do a great deal of harm in the long run.”
Posner was in civilian clothes tonight, a fact that surprised Kelly as did nothing else about the assistant military attaché. Military attachés—of all nations—have an advantage over other intelligence officers in that there is no dichotomy in what they are doing. They are, openly and by reciprocal treaty, spies in foreign countries. Not spies thinly masquerading as newsmen, AID officers, or vice-consuls, just spies. Their status makes it difficult for them to achieve results more remarkable than photographs of military parades, but it also permits them to believe that the world is as ordered a place as the bridge of an aircraft carrier in peacetime.
Posner’s wife, a slim woman whose smile seemed no more likely to slip than that of the Mona Lisa, bent close to her husband’s ear and whispered. He swore under his breath, glared at the cigarette, and ground it out in the clean ashtray with which a waiter had just replaced the overflowing one.
Mrs. Posner smiled at Kelly.
“I know,” said Kelly with a nod of false condolence to the naval officer. “It’s terrible to work for people as ruthless and clumsy as high military officers, ready to force the most ridiculous orders down the chain of command.”
Commander Posner sat up sharply, blinking as if he thought he had misheard the statement.
As perhaps he had, because the noise in the big room was even greater than was to be expected by Western standards. A significant sample of the American official community was at the party, and, Kelly noticed, a high proportion of the Turkish nationals was not in fact ethnic Turks. Men—almost all the women in the room were the wives of Americans—of the Levantine, Kurdish, East European, and even Jewish communities in Istanbul predominated here. They were the folk who, rightly or wrongly, felt they might need outside protection in or from what was basically an Osmanli—Ottoman Turkish—nation state.
The US was unlikely to supply that help, should it ever come down to cases; but when you’re nervous, a bad chance is better than no chance at all. Tom Kelly knew the feeling right enough.
There was a rattle of cymbals from the far doorway. A man in evening dress on the low podium in the center of the hall cried, his voice echoing through the ill-balanced sound system, “I give you Gisela!” in both English and Turkish.
Turkish music began at the far end of the hall. A man as tall as Doug Blakeley came in, carrying a large, chrome-glittering ghetto blaster, and stood by the doorway.
With a clash of finger cymbals, Gisela Romer appeared there. She was of a height with her assistant, though part of that was the pumps she wore.
Nothing in the file, photograph included, had prepared Kelly for the fact that the woman came as close to his ideal of beauty as anyone he had ever met in his life. Her shoulder-length hair was not the ash blond he had expected, but rather a richer color like that of polished brass or amber that has paled during long exposure to sunlight. Her choker, bra, and briefs were of those materials, brass and amber, and the gauze “skirt” depending from the briefs at her flanks and midline was silk dyed a yellow of low saturation.
The dancer moved down the hall toward the podium with a lithe grace and as much speed as comported with the need to make an entrance. Her arms reached above her head and twined at the wrists momentarily. Then, clashing the finger cymbals, she advanced, spinning with alternate hip jerks—each carrying her the length of a long leg closer to her goal. The man with the tape deck trailed her, accompanied by a shorter man playing what looked like a small acoustic guitar.
“I’ve never understood the attraction of Oriental dancing,” said Mrs. Posner distantly, using the technical term not from concern for anyone’s feelings but rather from a distaste for the word belly.
“Muscle control,” Kelly said. He watched intently as the blond mounted the podium and went into a formal routine, rotating slowly around the semicircle of the audience. “I’ve never seen a dancer with muscle control that good. Well, once before.”
Gisela’s hips shimmied and threw the gauze draperies outward, drawing the eyes of most in the room. Kelly watched instead what the actual belly muscles were doing and was flabbergasted. The blond woman was taut-bodied and no more fleshy than the veteran himself was, so the horizontal folds which ascended one after another from briefs to rib cage were not accented into crevices by folds of subcutaneous fat. They were impressive nonetheless, and the precision with which they marched upward like the static arcs of a Jacob’s ladder was nothing short of remarkable when combined with the flashier portions of the routine.
“Who was that?” someone asked.
Kelly glanced around him. Mrs. Posner waited, an eyebrow raised in interrogation, for the veteran’s answer.
“Bev,” said her husband with a grimace.
“A go-go dancer in Sydney,” Kelly said, turning again toward Gisela as he spoke, “tucked six Ping-Pong balls up her snatch with the mouth of a beer bottle. While she danced”—from the corner of his eye he noted that Mrs. Posner’s hand had lifted to cover her gaping mouth—“she spit ‘em out into the audience again. I mean, she could really aim, and some of ‘em landed in the third rank of tables.”
The woman made a choking sound but did not say anything further. Kelly thought there was the least hint of a smile on Commander Posner’s face.
The music thinned to a background of sharply-tapped drums, which Gisela counterpointed with her finger cymbals as she went into a long series of hip rolls, shifting position again with each thrust to make the whole audience part of the performance. Her face was not bored nor disfigured by slit-eyed, open-mouthed mimings of lust. Rather, she was alive and aware both of her audience and the fact that she was very damned good at what she was doing.
Gisela ran a full set on the podium before she began to work the room. Her stunning hair remained surprisingly still as her body, hidden from most angles in the narrow aisleways, shimmied and jerked.
Belly dancing was a form of gymnastics and, like other gymnastic routines, an acquired taste. The detailed muscle work, which distinguished this performance from that in a Sirkeci nightclub, was subtler than similar skill demonstrated on the parallel bars. As a result, the attention of most Westerners lapsed—even that of the men, who could see more flesh in cocktail bars in whatever city they called home.
But Christ! thought Tom Kelly, not flesh like that—unless they were dating gymnasts. And the Turkish citizens were noisily delighted, their enthusiasm making up for any lack of spirit among the foreigners present. Men at each table held up bills as the dancer swung close. In general Gisela smiled and shot a pelvis toward them, holding the pose long enough for them to tuck the money under the strap of her briefs.
The two music men accompanied her on her rounds, providing music—by Turkish definitions, rhythm by any—and a level not so much of protection as of presence, to keep matters from getting out of hand. Neither man was as young as Kelly, and the bigger one, for all that he looked fit, was closer to sixty than fifty. At intervals, as Gisela shifted her attention from table to table, the smaller fellow with the guitar plucked sweaty lire from the dancer’s waistband and stuffed them into the side pockets of his jacket. Even granting that most of the bills would be hundreds—something over a US dollar—Gisela was making a respectable haul.
And there were exceptions. One table held a quartet of fat, balding men with features similar enough to make them brothers. They had been drinking raki, Turkey’s water-clear national liquor that clouded over ice. Its licorice flavor disguised its ability to lift the scalp of an incautious drinker. Though these four were not inexperienced
, the volume of their intake tonight had loosened them considerably.
“Ho!” cried the nearest one as Gisela did a shoulder shimmy before him. He raised a bill over his head and flapped it. Kelly could not see what it was, but somebody at a nearby table hooted and clapped.
The blond woman responded with a belly roll that progressed to an amazing shimmy, a rattle of finger cymbals that overrode the drum taps from the boom box, and finally a forward thrust of her chest that brought her breasts within an inch of the man’s face. A bangle, either a large topaz or tawny paste, joined the two bra cups. It was beneath that that the man thrust his bill. There was a cheer and general applause from the surrounding tables.
The brother to whom Gisela now directed herself already had a bank note ready, but instead of waving it he shouted, “Wait!” in Kurdish to the hip-swaying woman and fumbled again in his wallet. The two others at the table who had not yet joined the performance were doing the same, bumping empty glasses in their haste to get out more money.
The second target—“victim” would be a misstatement; he was paying for the honor of momentarily starring before an audience of his peers and powerful foreigners—came out with a second bill, raised one in either hand, and was rewarded with a hip thrust, front and center, and a kiss on the forehead which, not coincidentally, shot Gisela’s crotch away from him as soon as he had inserted the money between the briefs and her pubic hair. You could get a lot more sex for a couple hundred dollars, but it would be hard to beat what Gisela had just provided the man in the way of thrills and public recognition.
When the dancer swayed from that table, her bra cups, pubic wedge, and the crack of her buttocks had all sprouted 10,000 lire bills. The engraved visage of Kemal Ataturk waved against the sweat-glistening flesh, and Kelly doubted that the hard-drinking old hero disapproved. Gisela left the crotch and tail pieces in place as encouragement for later tables as she continued her rounds.
The attendant with the recorder had swapped sides on his ninety-minute tape, and the blond dancer had been in motion from the time she entered the room. Kelly unconsciously caught a roll of flesh above his own beltline between thumb and forefinger. It wasn’t flab, but it sure as hell wasn’t muscle tone like that which Gisela was demonstrating. He hadn’t been in shape like that when he was nineteen and humping nearly a hundred pounds of gear, rations, and ammo across a series of thirty-klick days. . . .
The woman swayed closer. The table Kelly shared with the Posners was, by chance or intent, almost the last on her circuit of the room. Commander Posner reached toward his breast pocket. His wife straightened with an expression of blank horror that would have suited her own impalement.
“Well, I don’t know what the etiquette is,” the naval officer muttered with a nervous smile. “This is the wrong sort of entertainment for a—for a diplomatic gathering, you see.”
“Don’t worry, sir,” said Kelly dryly. “I’ll sacrifice myself to uphold the honor of the flag.”
He had two bank notes ready: thousands. The amount was a compromise between avoiding notoriety for a huge offering and the need to make reasonable the query on the scrap of paper between the two bills: Later? The three sheets were fanned slightly so that the note’s white edge was visible between the engraved expanses of currency.
Gisela hip-jerked to the table, turning a full 360 degrees as she left the guests she had just milked and—by switching her pivot foot—striding six feet without appearing to have abandoned them. Those men would not feel plucked and foolish when they went home tonight. It was nice watching a pro work, thought Kelly; and it was not only the woman’s dancing which was of professional quality.
She swung around, facing first toward Commander Posner, and did a slow belly roll with her arms twined above her. Posner clapped lightly in embarrassment but did not reach again for his wallet.
Close up, the two attendants looked as out of place as Kelly himself would have felt doing their jobs. There was quite a lot of similarity between what he saw behind their eyes and what he felt behind his own. . . . Both men could well be Germans, though the smaller one was as swarthy as Kelly and the taller one had certainly not been a “Nordic blond” before his hair went gray. They were armed—there were flat bulges beneath either’s left armpit.
Gisela blew a kiss at Posner, tinkled her finger cymbals toward Mrs. Posner (who winced) and switched to Kelly.
She was tired, the veteran could see, and her midriff glittered where sweat jeweled the tiny blond hairs which would otherwise have been invisible. She began a hip sway; and, as the taped music quickened to an accompaniment of chords clashed on the guitar, the sway sped into a shimmy.
“My wife could have done that,” Kelly said in German, enunciating precisely so that he did not have to shout to be understood. “But belly muscles like yours I have never seen, fraulein.”
The look on the woman’s face had been one of wariness masked by fatigue. Gisela tossed her heavy hair in its blond net and, with a smile as real and wicked as Kelly’s own as he watched her, went into a belly roll that speeded to the point that the movement but not the individual folds were visible.
“Ha!” she shouted after what seemed to have been a minute of frantic motion. She stamped her right foot and shifted back into a gentle hip sway as if a control had been thrown to a lower speed.
Gisela’s pelvis was prominent above the line of her spangled briefs. Kelly reached toward the point of her left hip with the currency and question. Rather than thrusting her flank toward him, Gisela bent and jerked her shoulders back so that the tassles on her left bra-cup flicked out against the bills.
“There,” she directed in a Platt-Deutsch accent, “for the thought. And I can do other things your wife never thought of, too.”
Her breast was warm; but then, so were Kelly’s fingers and everything else in the big room.
There was a louder cheer than expected from local tables, because very few of the Americans had gotten into the spirit of the affair as Kelly seemed to have done. Gisela strode and swayed liquidly to the podium to finish her act there. Kelly had fanned the note briefly to show the dancer it was there, but as she moved away from him he noticed that her fingers brushed the three pieces of paper into a thin sheaf so that the query was not visible amid the currency.
They were both actors, going through motions choreographed by others; neither able to admit to the other what their real purposes and intentions were, or what they knew of the other party’s. It was human society in microcosm, Kelly supposed.
Within moments of the time Gisela sprang from the room with a series of leggy bounds and double-handed kisses toward the guests to either side of her path, chairs and a speaker’s stand were set up on the podium by members of the hotel staff.
“We really ought to stay for the speeches,” Posner said apologetically in response to a whisper from his wife.
“They’ll be in Turkish,” Mrs. Posner replied, and in a tone that suggested she had been asked to go mud-wrestling.
Kelly looked at her, amazed. She seemed to think that after-dinner speeches at an affair like this were likely to be more boring in a language you didn’t understand than they would be in one that you did.
A waiter approached, so soon after the dancer had left that Kelly assumed he was changing the defense attaché’s ashtray once again. Instead, the waiter offered a folded note to Kelly himself with a smirk. It was the paper he had slipped between the thousand lire bills, and beneath his own Later? was written in a loose, jerky hand, Why don’t we talk about it at the door to the parking lot?
Well, that was fast. Kelly rose, setting his chair back with one hand while he balanced the weight of his torso over the table with the other. “Mrs. Posner,” he said as he leaned toward the couple, “Commander, I appreciate your company, but I think I’ve found my own ride home.” Or somewhere.
Mrs. Posner nodded distantly. Her husband, frowning, said, “Mr. Bradsheer—take care.”
“Thank you, Commander.” Kelly sho
ok the naval officer’s hand, then walked toward the exit.
The cooler, less smoky air of the hallway as he went to the elevators did not seem at first to clear Kelly’s sinuses. Rather, motion and oxygen brought with them a pounding headache as smoke-constricted capillaries tried to adjust to the new demands.
The parking lot north of the big hotel was actually off the basement rather than on a level with the front entrance to the ground-floor lobby. A hotel here, where almost all the guests would arrive in and use taxis instead of their own cars, had less need for parking than a similar 450-room unit in Washington, but that meant there would probably be a great deal of congestion tonight. Kelly shrugged as he got off the elevator, loosening his coat and his muscles, trying to be prepared for anything at all.
Gisela Romer was, quite literally, waiting at the far end of the hall, beside the glazed outside door. The shorter of her two attendants was visible through the panel, glancing in through the door and out again toward the crowded parking lot with the wariness of a point man on patrol.
The woman wore a long cloth coat, belted and not buttoned. Kelly wondered momentarily whether she had simply thrown it on over her costume, but the beige frill of a blouse showed at the cuff when she waved at him. “Are you the sort of man a girl can trust in a wicked world, Mr. Monaghan?” she called. It was Kelly’s war name from the time he trained Kurds rather than what was on his present ID as a Boeing Services employee.
“Well, you know,” Kelly said as he strolled to her side. The man outside stared at him like a vicious dog which precisely knows the length of its chain. “If you drop a bowling ball, you can trust it to do certain things. You just have to know ahead of time if they’re the things you want.”
Gisela smiled, an expression that made the most of the width of her mouth. “I think I’ll trust you to protect my life, Monaghan. As for my virtue, I’ll decide later if that needs to be protected or not.”